ebrary.com announced that 11 new publishers will make their content available to libraries as a subscription. The new publishers are: Demos Medical Publishing, Facts on File (perpetual access only), Helicon Publishing, Hentzenwerke, International Research Development Center (IRDC), IOS Press, National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), Syracuse University Press, Thieme Medical Publishers, the University of Minnesota Press and Humana Press.

Previously, traditional medical databases were the provider for online textbooks (MDConsult, StatRef, Ovid), a few medical publishers even ventured out to offer full text access to their published collection (AccessMedicine from McGraw Hill, and ScienceDirect books from Elsevier). Now here is what appears to be more of an ebook provider (not a traditional medical database provider) with a collection of medical/health books available (for a price).

Their medical/health collection while one of their smaller collections, already has a nice list of medical/health contributing health publishers: BIOS, BMJ, CABI, Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Marcel Dekker, Springer/Kluwer, Karger, etc.

Libraries can either subscribe to a whole collection or pick and choose books and libraries can subscribe using a single user access model for a title or multi user license model for a title (no prices listed).

I feel like I have been living under a rock because, until now I really haven't heard of ebrary. Perhaps that is because they market themselves more to academic libraries, who knows. Maybe there is a medical librarian more familiar with them who can provide us with some more information. With the list of contributing medical/health publishers, this might be another nice ebook provider option for medical libraries.